This piece was essentially inspired by the Guns N’ Roses song “coma”. In that song you can clearly hear the breathing, the heartbeat, and the brain is disconnected. Everything is jumbled up, the organs.

This is an ongoing exploration and it shows the progression of my illustrative style. I was originally going to include other things such as a telephone and my intention was to do a digital illustration. But I decided to start by doing an artwork on paper that just featured bodily organs instead.

This is one of my earliest works in this series. You can tell because I don’t draw/paint the hearts with the veins in them anymore. Plus, the heart looks like it is a separate object and then the other tubes “attached” later (because they were). These days I draw the valves coming out of the heart so that they join ‘continuously’ with the other objects (if you get my drift).

Also, my brains have evolved somewhat and if you look at any of my more recent works, they kind of resemble walnuts now. This brain has a more traditional, random, less stylised approach to it. And lastly, I don’t draw tracheas with concentric circles on them anymore.

This is also where I started to really control the colours of pigments in my watercolour palette after I got rid of a load of pigments that I didn’t like. There is only one colour present in this artwork which I don’t use anymore and that is the synthetic orange pigment just underneath the green iris. Nowadays I use real vermillion pigment instead.